Another Post on Male Gaziness, So Let's Up the Creepy Factor by 10000

Amidst the suicide, the voyeurism, and the thirty years of obsession and fetishization of the Lisbon girls by the narrators, the creepiest part of the novel, I found, was the narrators' initial description of the girls. After Cecilia had slit her wrists, they described her as having "the odor of a mature woman" and spoke of her "budding chest." Peter Sissen ignores the strewn underpants and bras and is fascinated by the girls' tampons. These images don't describe the girls as  pretty or even sexy, but show that the narrators see them as fertile; the creepiest of the images being of the girls going to church "bursting with their fructifying flesh." (This brings in a third aspect to the idealized woman that was not present in our analysis of Black Swan; instead of the virgin/whore dichotomy we now have a gender trinity of virgin, whore, and baby-maker. Not related to my blog post but interesting).

In constructing "a story they could live with" the boys never give an explicit psychoanalytic reason that the girls committed suicide, but Shostak argues that the implicit reason they give, the one that fits in with their sexual (and apparently baby-making) desire of the girls, is that sexual repression ultimately did the girls in. This is stated after Cecilia's death both from Dr. Hornicker's report and the widely believed rumor that she killed herself out of love for Dominic. This misinterpretation of the girls is epitomized during their conversation through music; the boys predominantly played love songs whereas the girls were much more morbid in content. Nevertheless, the boys fully believed they were having a fluid conversation, and that the morbidness of the music resulted from the girls' repressed desire for them. Superimposing that on the previous point, the fact that the boys see the girls as fertile stems from their own budding sexuality, and has a consequence in the boys truly believing that, like them, the girls don't really have anything else on their mind besides sex, because of their physical fertility. This is what leads to the tragic misconstruing of the girls' life and death.

That, in essence, is what makes the novel so tragic. The boys, even in adulthood, are so sure that it's a sex thing and what little shreds of unbiased, un-narrated evidence we get show that it's so not.